I am sure this is an old topic and hashed out but I am new so I am curious, will it one day be possible to Nav, play, and do combat from the bridge? For me, this would make the game much more immersive and I think with the proper HUD, it could be done without any accuracy of control lost.

The basic problem is that if you are thinking of a HUD, just an overlay over the space view which shows the "viewscreen" and crew around it, you aren't really adding anything that significantly changes the combat. The overlay would have to be static, or utilize simple animations that would basically mean a lot of effort for very little benefit.

On the other hand, if you want to have the 3D Bridge view, with the view of space out through the viewscreen, you're basically seeing two views at the same time. One of your Bridge, where you as the captain are the avatar, and one in space, where your ship is the avatar. The game, unfortunately, treats both of these as the same thing. When you go to the bridge, you disappear from wherever you were in space. You can see then when someone flies up to a planet or a DSE In space. They disappear, as they move to the instance map generated to hold that mission.

So what it comes down to is, you CAN'T see the Bridge, or anywhere else on the interior of your ship, and the view outside your ship at the same time, because there isn't any "outside your ship". You're not in space, you're on the Bridge. And as long as you are on the Bridge, you are not in space.

The devs have mentioned that they would like to add additional things for you to do on your ship, and plan on adding them over time. Such as, a hangar bay that you might go to to launch a shuttle, or some sort of function you might perform in Engineering or Sick Bay to heal Injuries. But nav travel from the Bridge is very hard to implement (since you'd have to somehow track where you are in space) and combat from the Bridge is pretty much never going to happen. Something like Bridge Commander, where you give orders to officers who then carry them out, is certainly not going to happen, as it would be much slower than the current system, and place you at a disadvantage.